260 IN SEARCH OF OLD FRITZ^260Frederick's later years, but they do not take us far along the way to
understanding the whole man. We are left with those extraordinary
paradoxes which render the present study as unsatisfactory as all the
rest.
While phenomena like 'Prussian military discipline', 'the obli-
que order' and so on might have led us to suppose that their creator
was a man of cool precision and detail, Frederick emerges as a
creature of intense emotions and artistic temperament. His grasp of
finance, like his allocation of strategic resources, was instinctive in
character. He maintained to Voltaire that geometry dried out the
wits, and in his writings he took little trouble over the accurate
reproduction of dates, numbers, names and all the other minutiae
which mean so much to little people. He was only too glad when
picturesque weeds grew up to disturb the symmetry of the Sans Souci
gardens, and he forbade his gardeners to uproot them.
The king was writing for himself, as much as for any of his
generals, when he urged the vital necessity of preserving military
secrets. A French diplomat observed:He is indiscreet by nature, and in this respect he commits
blunders which are unpardonable in such an intelligent man... The difficulty for the listener comes in sorting out the king's
true opinion from the host of contradictory utterances which
fall from his lips, especially after he has noticed that he has let
slip something which he should have kept to himself. (Lord
Tyrconnell, in Volz, 1926-7, I, 263)
Frederick expressed contempt for mankind in general, and he
was notorious for the hurt he inflicted on people who failed to live up
to his arbitrary standards of military excellence, or from whom he
desired to extract information or ransoms. At the same time there are
grounds for believing that Frederick was not a particularly cruel
person - indeed, it is not extravagant to claim that many of his
instincts were milder than those generally allowed in the Western
world for decades or centuries to come. He deplored hunting, not just
for the waste of time and money, but for the cruelty inflicted on
innocent creatures. He counted prize-fighting as one of the objection-
able habits of the English. He replied with angry sarcasm to one of his
customs officials who asked for leave for his brother, a Bordeaux
merchant, to go slaving under the Prussian flag:
I have always been of the opinion that the trade in negroes is a
blight on the human race. Never shall I do anything to
authorise or promote it. However, if this business is so attractive
to you, you have only to go back to France to be able to indulge